Harrying of the North

The Harrying of the North occurred in the winter of 1069-1070 when the recently-crowned King of England William the Conqueror brutally suppressed Anglo-Saxon and Danish resistance to Norman rule in Yorkshire, County Durham, and Northumberland.

Background
Following the 1066 Battle of Hastings, most of the land previously owned by Anglo-Saxon nobles was now held by the Normans, who built defensive motte-and-bailey castles to suppress Saxon dissent and huge stone cathedrals to bring their Catholic French culture to the British Isles. After the death of King Harold Godwinson at Hastings, the brothers Earls Edwin of Mercia and Morcar of Northumbria backed the Anglo-Saxon noble Edgar Atheling in claiming the throne, thus rebelling against the recently-crowned Norman King of England, William the Conqueror. The two earls later submitted to William due to a lack of strong opposition, and they were rewarded with land in the north. When William had to return to Normandy, where he was still Duke, he took the brothers as hostages to ensure that they did not rebel against him while he was absent. In 1068, shortly after returning to England, the brothers immediately incited an Anglo-Saxon revolt in Mercia in response to the Normans' cruelty. William, dealing with a series of revolts at the same time (at Dover, Exeter, Hereford, Nottingham, Durham, York, and Peterborough), headed north and built a number of defensive castles. The brothers were once again forced to submit to William; they were pardoned and held as hostages again, but they were able to escape. On 28 January 1069, William replaced Morcar as Earl of Northumbria with a Norman (Robert de Comines) without consulting the locals, who were outraged. Edwin and Morcar instigated a new uprising, resulting in the massacre of the new Earl and 900 of his men.

The Harrying
The uprising against Robert at Durham was quickly followed by the rebels' capture of York and the outbreak of other rebellions in Dorset, Shrewsbury, and Devon. The people of northern England were mostly Anglo-Scandinavian and were ruled by Danish-descended aristocrats who had been granted a great degree of autonomy by King Edgar of England during the 960s. The rebels succeeded in persuading the Danish king, Sweyn Estridsson, to assemble a fleet commanded by his sons and invade the east coast of England, and, after William retook York in April 1069, the Dano-Saxon force again captured York.

In the winter of 1069, William began a brutal campaign of submission which came to be known as the "Harrying of the North". William's army plundered and destroyed every village from the Humber to the Tees, burning down farmsteads, slaughtering the animals, destroying the crops, and plowing salt into the earth to prevent new crops from growing; the inhabitants who were not murdered were starved, and over 100,000 people died, while the survivors were reduced to eating cats and dogs or even humans. Several thousand refugees died during their journey south. By 1086, 60% of all holdings in Yorkshire were laid waste, 66% of all villages contained wasted manors, only 25% of the population and plough teams remained, and 80,000 oxen and 150,000 people were killed.

Aftermath
With the population of northern England subdued, William replaced the remaining Anglo-Saxon lords with loyal Norman ones. Edgar Aetheling sought the help of King Malcolm III of Scotland with fighting back against William, and Malcolm married Edgar's sister Margaret of Wessex to seal the alliance; this marriage would provide Scotland with an excuse to invade northern England whenever it wished, as Malcolm could claim that his actions were redress for his brother-in-law's treatment. In 1072, William concluded a treaty with Malcolm, and Edgar submitted in 1074. In 1080, when the Norman Bishop of Durham was murdered by the local Saxons, William sent another army to harry the Northumbrian countryside, and much of the land from York to Durham was ravaged and many noblemen driven into exile. As a result of the depopulation, the Norman landowners sought settlers to work in the fields, and the Normans came to occupy the upper ranks of society while the Anglo-Scandinavians continued to form the majority of the population; their dialect of Middle English survived for centuries, and pre-Conquest personal names remained popular into the 1200s.